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Bright Ideas Change the World

Leadership

What’s trauma got to do with it?

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Last week Jordan Neely was killed on a New York City subway when a bystander “approached Mr. Neely, put him in a chokehold, and held him until he became limp.” [New York Times]

In Kansas City (Ralph Yarl), New York (Kaylin Gillis), and Atlanta (Heather Roth and Payton Washington) people (notably young people in these examples) have been shot for ringing the wrong doorbell, using the wrong driveway or getting into the wrong car.

There are countless little and big reasons for these events. But in many ways they’re the product of systemic fear and trauma that dehumanizes the people around us.

We’re also living through a pandemic that has killed over a million Americans and continues to have long-term impacts. Climate change is scaling up the reach of natural disasters.

And we live with distraction. Stories about all this. Debates over cause and motive leave little time to focus and little energy with which to be well.

An aside: I write this knowing I’m not mentioning incidents to what happened in the past 10 days in Allen, Texas or Cleveland, Texas or Brownsville, Texas. Those are tragedies. Perhaps greater ones. It’s doubly tragic that we need a language to convey value or gauge impact of these events. How do we write of any of this when there is so much of it?

Recognize the Impact of Trauma

Does it make sense for communities and organizations to better recognize and address the role trauma is playing and will play in lives of their supporters, staff and broader community?

Like it or not, our donors, members and email lists are made up of people constantly struggling with climate disaster, gun violence, inequality and pandemics. There’s a lot of talk about drops in individual giving. Falls (and rises) in giving are most always associated with “the economy.” Perhaps trauma, fear and dehumanization drive people to withdraw from community engagement and membership.

Tying fundraising results and strategies to economic indicators makes sense. But it limits our view of what’s happening and what’s possible.

We can’t only optimize our recruitment, fundraising and testing for those with financial and other forms of security. These audiences will lead us towards policies and politics that favor the fortunate, preserve power and aren’t interested in systemic problems. These are also audiences that may continue to shrink. One can only evade the sources of trauma for so long.

Organizations should also question their role in creating instead of healing trauma. Crisis-driven messaging dominates advocacy and fundraising communications of groups doing wonderful environmental, human rights and social justice work, including those organizing and working alongside communities.

Community Resilience

Our communities, supporters and staff need us to both recognize, solve for and support trauma. That’s a big ask. One far greater than the remit of many (most) nonprofits.

Fortunately, there are models, partners and opportunities to do more of this work and do it better.

The pandemic taught us that organizations can engage in community support beyond our mission.

A team of researchers from the University of California at San Diego and the city of Los Angeles looked at developing trauma resilient communities through community capacity-building in 2021. The team recognized the impact weather disasters and the pandemic had on the ability of communities to feed and shelter people. Over time, these and other events wear down community resiliency.

They found correlation between trauma informed community practices and community health.

We found that capacity-building among community-based partnerships is effective at disseminating trauma-informed education and training, conducting outreach and engagement, linking community members with resources, and increasing help-seeking and social connectedness by community members.

Community capacity to recognize and address trauma will build stronger communities. It may also address fear and our ability to address inequality and justice.

…is community capacity-building a foundational competency that can mitigate the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and flooding or future acts of social injustice?

So why don’t more organizations speak openly about trauma? I think it has such a systemic presence that no group, assuming they acknowledge it at all, sees how they can address it.

Prioritize Novel Community Collaboration

We can debate the causes of inflation and a turn towards austerity-based policies by both parties. But the situation on the ground is that housing, food and job insecurity (or the loss of all three) affects Americans everywhere. Tim Garvin, director of the United Way of Central Massachusetts, recently wrote about the situation in Worcester and the need to remember lessons in community collaboration learned during COVID. The community formed a working group called Worcester Together in March, 2020, and it continues to collaborate:

Worcester Together continues to meet, 1,148 days and counting. It has evolved into a place where observations, news and data are shared, all focused on working together for the good of the community.

Look, I’m no expert on trauma-informed practices. But I do know that offering people resources, support and training to meet their needs best done through community, not individual, practices. And a resilient community, one whose members can rely on and trust one another, is not just able to weather crisis but is also more likely to engage in and support democratic processes.

The rush to community-level innovation we saw in 2020-21 was driven by radical uncertainty. Suddenly, everyone was working remotely. Suddenly, everyone sought ways to provide food and housing assistance. Scott Warren, former CEO of Generation Citizen, wrote about creative collaboration and groups sharing resources for the first time.

But crises wane even if the underlying structures are weakened. Typically, there is little incentive for organizations (or their funders) to invest in or test new collaborations and community building.

I recently spoke to a colleague who spent 18 months piloting sustainable engagement with rural and small community residents who have a social media presence. The goal is to support climate-positive conversation in places that typically only hear and see climate stories from right-leaning TV, radio and social media sources. It’s sensible, not radical, work. But it takes time and isn’t a project that fits neatly into the boxes and sectors into which funders and organizations operate.

Perhaps we’re seeing a shift towards trauma-informed community capacity building. There are efforts to measure community stress and address trauma in educational settings.

But I wonder how (even if) we can prioritize new models of collaboration across disciplines and issues. Can donors, funders and organizations share learning, skills and resources to build community capacity, resilience and relationships to address trauma and instill trust, hope and love instead of fear? If so it may be one way to protect not just our communities but democracy itself.

Membership architectures to create power

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A conversation with Ben Pollard of London-based Local Welcome about community, resilience and power.

Nonprofits and community groups (and what many around the world call civil society) often hold different views about the purpose and goals of community building. 

Organizations may tackle big problems, provide resources and support others. Think of food banks, shelters and disaster assistance. When successful these communities are changing lives, keeping people healthy and providing homes. 

We need a certain amount of civic courage to do “politics without violence.” Unfortunately, the architecture of our digital communities – Facebook, etc. – is about maximizing polarization instead of civic courage.

Ben Pollard

Another model builds power alongside members. Community offers opportunities for co-creation, collaboration and resilience. Membership, including the monetary support that often comes with it, gives the community power by providing resources, bodies, labor and skill.

Both approaches bring value. The first centers power in the organization. The other expects community members to hold power, create solutions and support one another. 

The pandemic has thrust both models into relief. Weak safety nets have left people dependent on unsafe jobs or just unemployed. 

I recently spoke with Ben Pollard, the founder of Local Welcome, a London-based group that helps communities organize meals that bring together long-time local residents and recent migrants. 

Last year, Local Welcome posted a series of “what we learned” articles. For example, 5 things we’ve learned about leadership and 5 things we’ve learned about being a good partner. These draw out themes that you – or any community-based organization – may apply in your work. 

I planned our latest conversation as an opportunity to hear more about the lessons that helped Local Together respond to the pandemic with what I call a “pivot with community.” In essence, the focus on community leadership and partnership instead of logistics and “meals served” let the team better recognize and solve for community needs. And use its strengths. 

What we ended up talking about, though, was a little bit of community architecture,  membership theory and power practice. 

Three ideas about community surfaced for me this conversation. 

  1. The “why” of community and membership often defaults to self-interest. Especially in our dominant digital community infrastructures.
  2. Group membership is a powerful source of resilience. 
  3. There’s been a decline in membership as a source of power.

This conversation is for you if you’re membership person, community builder, and/or interested in the power dynamics between members, organizations and funders. 

Ben began the conversation reflecting on his approach to community building, leadership and power. We started by surfacing the struggles and lessons of Local Welcome during the pandemic. 

Last year Local Welcome endured a pandemic that made community meals difficult at best and launched Local Together and ADHD Together. 2020 speaks to community resilience. Say a little bit about how you view come to view community and its purpose.

I grew up in diverse church communities. My parents were basically missionaries in North Africa running a church supporting Black African communities who were not safe in 1980s Algeria. This included hiding people in basements, helping them escape and other adventures.

It wasn’t safe and we came back to England. We were in Liverpool after the riots. It was a part of the world hollowed out by neoliberalism and Thatcher. 

I experienced being in a very poor but close-knit community. Eventually I went to boarding school and really grew up in schools from then on. 

I missed the real world and closeness of those communities. A lot of my 20s were spent involved in church communities proactively changing the world. I was campaigning and organizing. It was rewarding but exhausting. These church communities were very intentional in thinking about membership and leadership.

Life, I observed, is fundamentally better during hard times when there is a close-knit community that builds resilience and social capital.

But I burned out. I wanted to remain part of these communities but no longer subscribed to their worldview. I also found I was struggling with undiagnosed ADHD. It was affecting every part of my life, work and relationships. 

I was reframing my understanding of the world at a time when I was missing being in a close community. 

Also worth adding that this was also a time when I was observing my brother’s work in government digital service. He had gone into tech and was working as a Director at the Government Digital Service where he led the GOV.UK team that built a single website for all of UK government. Meanwhile, I was part of a campaign trying to negotiate with the immigration minister. My sense then was that he was having a bigger impact working on the digital side. I learned a lot by watching what he was doing. 

Now I’m assessing all this in the context of the past few years, especially 2020. People are isolated. Our community structures aren’t caring for people. We haven’t really seen community organizing admit or recognize that there’s a crisis of civil society and membership in particular. 

These days, most organizations approach community with a digital-first layer. Or only with a digital layer (especially in the pandemic). That opens up community, doesn’t it? Does that digital layer help?

Design and tech are just part of a bigger problem for civil society. Digital has been framed as a savior. We’re all “citizens in the Internet age,” after all. 

But we need civil society to go on a more important journey. People storming the Capitol makes me think of people who feel left behind. And sometimes people are left behind. There are a lot of very isolated people out there. 

Many people have lost jobs and a sense of place in the world. They aren’t members of anything any longer. I’m thinking of the book Alienated America. [Timothy P. Carney, 2019] The genie is out of the bottle. We need to remember how to do the things that were responses to first industrial revolution: settlement houses, work of the Quakers…but do those again with technology. Great examples in history that we’ve forgotten and need translation for today.

Tech isn’t the problem but it has been captured by political elites and financial institutions. 

Have community organizations to become less welcoming to progressive worldviews that may support these “service to others” programs? I’m thinking of churches mostly here, I guess, but also unions and other community groups. 

I don’t think this is a problem of evangelical churches. Settlement houses and other work at the beginning of the labor movement came about through associations, labor and churches. 

There’s a feedback loop: You’re not a member of anything so you have fewer opportunities to observe others or practice civic rituals. You lose familiarity with what Bernard Crick called “politics as the negotiation of difference without violence.”

We need a certain amount of civic courage to do “politics without violence.” Unfortunately, the architecture of our digital communities – Facebook, etc. – is about maximizing polarization instead of civic courage. 

We spoke a few months ago about steps to build and sustain community. You said:  

Rituals are ways of gathering people to tell their stories. 

I highlighted and circled that — and keep coming back to it. Stories, and sharing them, are a kind of bridging ritual. What have you learned about community ritual in transitioning your work from in person to virtual? What’s consistent? What changed? 

It’s been joyful and surprising to discover how much of the learning about rituals has been translatable to the design of our online ADHD groups. These online gatherings can feel like an old-fashioned house meeting. I’ve also been surprised at how powerful a well-designed ritual can be online. 

People are hungry for the safety of structure. They’re exhausted by the constant flow of time during the pandemic. We don’t have milestones.

We’ve been thinking and talking about ritual for a few years at Local Welcome. We’re designing how people interact because we want to create conditions for well-being, belonging and civic literacy. Bringing people together is just an important step towards the bigger goal: the capacity to do politics. That is the power to do good.

Rituals have been a powerful way of approaching that vision. At its best, ritual reinforces a shared story. When we’re hungry for security we don’t know what story to believe so finding a story that’s shared and makes sense of the world is powerful. 

Organizations and systems also have rituals. How we interact with government is all about ritual. And there are shared stories about it. Similar with organizations. Think about how rituals and their stories reflect who has power. 

I’ve also been thinking about the rituals of growing up, becoming an adult and seeing the big complex world. Rituals can help us grow up. Or they can give us shared permission to not grow up. And it can be dangerous when childish communities learn to do ritual. 

Membership, Ritual and Power

Talking to Ben in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, I’m left wondering about QAnon, the American far-right (including militias and now much of GOP,) and the power of digital community architecture to create childish and exclusionary rituals that create a veneer of community and socialization.

These are all examples of rituals that make us feel like we’re part of community: joining a Facebook group or Parler, adding a Q symbol to a Twitter bio, copy/pasting an extreme post. They’re thoughtless, even childish, rituals. But potentially powerful: there was an insurrection on January 6th. 

Three ideas about community surfaced for me this conversation. People working in and with civil society, nonprofits, community building and even civic tech may recognize some of these issues. 

First, the “why” of community and membership often defaults to organizational self-interest. The digital layer of community isn’t helping. We often point to professionalization, high salaries and the “non-profit industrial complex” as reasons why organizations use membership to serve themselves instead of the broader community. But modern community architecture, especially online and when mediated by social networks, isn’t optimized for community. 

Second, group membership is a powerful source of resilience. Modern community models use technology to build lists of people and scale community size but they optimize for individualism instead of interdependency. Instead of resilience and support we get self-help. 

Finally, there’s been a decline in membership as a source of power. A growing reliance on foundations and philanthropy disincentivizes membership. Churches and unions needed members to build community and serve others. But they also used membership payments to build infrastructure, provide resources to members and develop leaders. A digital world blurs community and membership. Anyone and everyone can belong. Anyone can leave. Maybe you pay. Maybe you don’t. Organizations learn not to rely on members and people aren’t invested in being a member. 

Links for your spare time. What is time, really?

The best newsletter about newsletters ever. Wow…have you seen the Trump’s fascist propaganda film from January 6?! Fish to humans: BE QUIET. 15 years after its founding, Twitter looks for revenue. Twitter is also opening its archives to researchers. Here’s how to have better conversations with the voice in your head. Maybe there’s an inverse relationship between use of blackletter fonts and the general health of society. The success of “watch me clean” videos also says something not so good about the collective. The pandemic has crushed casual friendships (I feel this, do you?).

Five questions to ask about membership

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Why do people say they belong to a community?

What are some fundamental books and essays on community? I’d love to hear your suggestions. I’ve been reading and revisiting them, looking for common lessons on how groups and communities thrive. More importantly, we’re looking at how a sense of belonging deepens and spreads across networks.

Think for a minute about why people join, stick with or leave a community. What takes us from curious to membership to a deeper sense of belonging and commitment?

I’ve been going to the same yoga studio five or six days a week for ten years. My calendar says I last took a class there on Sunday, March 8th, 2020. I went for the classes, sure, but it was a community – familiar faces, friendly people, and a regular set of events and expectations.

As COVID settled in, the studio closed for a couple months before reopening. Going back didn’t feel safe (which may or may not be the case but I have plenty of reasons to minimize COVID exposure). They offered access to recorded classes. They were ok but there’s something a little depressing (or comical, if you like) about strangers running through yoga poses in a sterile room in a nameless building in a nameless city. A workout, sure, but certainly no sense of community.

Then I heard that someone who used to teach at the local studio would be streaming live classes over zoom. I actually know several who are doing this. What I got were familiar if sometimes rough around the edges sessions. There was some banter and conversation. Other people in the zoom window. There’s some sense of connection and community.

Why community?

In The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, Priya Parker notes that we tend to focus on the mechanics of gathering. The when and where. The agenda. The food and drink. Who says what and when.

But the heart of a successful gathering (and a community is, in some sense, an ongoing cascade of gatherings) is knowing why you’re really gathering. Why do people come to your gathering? Why do they come back? If it’s a book club it’s probably not just about the book. If it’s a yoga class (and, yes, a recorded yoga class is as much a gathering as a live class) it’s about more than the sequence of poses.

The question of why a community exists (or why you should put in the work of joining, starting or sticking with one) comes up in every book on community.

Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh and Kai Elmer Sotto run People and Company. In 2019 they published the wonderful Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People. They push community leaders to answer the why are we coming together question. Ways of looking at the question, they write, include:

  • What do people need more of?
  • What change do we desire?
  • What problem can we solve together?

The why is something to be done, learned, found, explored together. It’s not process (meet at 9, check in, report back, etc.). It’s people.

In The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging, Charles Vogl defines community as: A group of people who share a mutual concern for one another’s welfare. That doesn’t tell you that figuring out the why of your community is essential. But it tells me that the why of a successful community is almost always (in Vogl’s exerperience and observation) going to involve others, not just ourselves.

You’re engaging with, learning from and working with others in most any successful community group, organization or brand. The progress or success of others is connected to yours. That could be complicated and long term (AA, Weight Watchers, a union or advocacy group) or simple (a book or running club that shares companionship, conversation, or ways to stay in shape every couple weeks).

Membership is about others, not a process

Most of the communities described above (and mentioned in these books as examples of communities with a clear why) are membership groups. They use the concepts and language of membership. You give something to join, the community gives to you, and you belong.

But membership groups, like all communities, need to define and continually revisit their “why.” Especially in the context of togetherness. With whom are we doing this? What are we doing together? And, of course, why?

Too many membership organizations lose the why and focus on the mechanics. The process. They may have a sharp marketing or advocacy campaign. Perhaps good approach to Facebook ad targeting. But we’ve all ended up in relationships or jobs that flamed out. They seemed like a match but soon it was all about showing up and checking the boxes. We forget why we’re there and who we’re there for. That happens to members, too.

So, thinking about the why (and not the what or when or how) of membership in a community sparks a few questions:

  1. Why do people really join your community? (and have you asked any of them this question?)
  2. Why are people coming back?
  3. Why does a member tell someone else about the community?
  4. Why does a member value and support other members?
  5. Why does the community (and your organization) need and want members?
An orange starburst image.

Things we’re reading as adults move into the White House

How we pulled apart and how we can ‘come together’ again. Polling and research from the RSA shows a greater interest in public collaboration, working together and community building than one sees in the media, on social networks. Anthony Painter also reflects on how community engagement is referred to in The Upswing, a recent book by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.

Senator Ben Sasse wanders can’t help but “both sides” an argument with a few cherry picked tweets. But his QAnon is Destroying the GOP from Within essay in The Atlantic focuses on how the pervasive lack of meaning within growing complexity and inequality. And, unlike political campaigns that just seek to turn search for belonging into a vote, QAnon, Trump and today’s GOP has operationalized confusion and search for meaning as organized hostility towards (waves hands) pretty much everything.

Trolling for Truth on Social Media. Joan Donovan, Scientific American.
For anyone who still cares deeply about the truth and people’s access to it, fighting back involves dispatching with the ideology that technological platforms are democracy in action. They have shifted from connecting people to people to connecting people to information, tilting power toward those groups that have the most resources. They are also fundamentally businesses that have scaled without a plan for mitigating the harmful effects they have on society.

The Story is a Forest: How to Talk About Climate Change
..the largest challenge climate communicators face today: How can we motivate people using words they connect with while also challenging the status quo?—?that is, the extractivism, competition and consumerism driving climate change?

52 things I learned in 2020. Tom Whitwell, Fluxx Studio

Forget “Building Back Better” — Technology Needs to Be Built Differently. Bianca Wylie explores the connection between weak government tech skills and research capacity and the control tech companies (gig companies like Uber and DoorDash, for instance) have over broader labor policy.

Decades of outsourcing technology policy work (and its attendant risks) to consulting firms is a hard habit to break. This outsourcing has also left operational capacity of the state severely depleted.

How Trees Made Us Human by Daniel Immerwahr is a fascinating look at how wood, or rather the once endless forests of America, shaped American expansion, cities and narrative of individualism and possibility.

Accelerating membership innovation

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Let’s strengthen organizations, raise more money and scale up impact by speeding up how we learn about and position membership programs.

A membership innovation community of practice will identify and speed understanding of what’s working, best practices and innovation across a broad range of communications, engagement, fundraising, and organizing activities in nonprofits, journalism, political campaigns and social-good business.

Don’t want all the background? Jump to project goals and process.

Comments? Feedback? Suggestions? Send an email or contact us.

We believe membership – people joining, investing in, learning from, and acting in partnership with others – is (or could be) a strong framework for scaling deep and sustainable activism and healthier organizations. This brief provides a path towards testing that idea.

Membership is critical to sustaining relevance, revenue and sustainability.

Membership has a long, global history. Groups like the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, National Geographic, Consumers Union and League of Women Voters are membership based.

Labor unions are membership-driven as are cooperatives (local grocery co-ops, for example, and outdoor stores like REI in the United States and MEC in Canada).

Community groups (Rotary Club, garden clubs) and trade associations are also membership based. And millions of people become members associations like the American Association of Retired Persons People every year.

People become members by investing money and time. In many cases, people receive career guidance, networking, volunteer opportunities, discounted products, invitations to events and more.

What is membership? For the purposes of this brief, we view membership as having three parts:

  1. People investing in an organization.
  2. An organization investing in people.
  3. A framework that binds together the interests of people and an organization.

Why do people become members of an organization? The simplest reason: because they’re asked. Usually by people they know. Most members enter an organization with at least one active relationship.

Members receive access to services and benefits for the time, money and personal capital they offer groups. Members are often given opportunities to meet, interact and learn from one another. People also learn and improve skills, take on volunteer roles and eventually become leaders. In many advocacy organizations, membership offers people an opportunity to directly engage with others and the organization in actions around a shared mission or vision for the world.

Let’s assume there is some value (or at least a bit of accuracy) in the above definition of membership, it’s historical presence and why people put their hard-earned money and time into an organization as a member.

It’s worth noting that the public service journalism sector is looking to membership as a path towards revenue growth and sustainability as well as knowledge and service. The Membership Puzzle Project is one example of that sector’s search for stronger member-driven skills and projects.

The Problem

Today, nonprofits (both advocacy and community service groups), associations and journalism/media organizations (nonprofit and for-profit) use a variety of membership models to secure direct and indirect support.

Membership programs are usually built around and optimized for fundraising. People are asked for a minimal amount of time, a $30 donation, a Facebook follow, an email address. They receive a thank you (hopefully). They are passed into the hands of staff running fundraising and advocacy programs.

Membership programs are typically separate from organizing and communications. Software/CRMs may track donations and email opens. But software only does what the people using it ask. Organizations do little to build member relationships (or, in other words, do little to invest in the needs of members). People are either bombarded by messaging in their inboxes and social media feeds. Or receive little at all.

Everyone is concerned about impact. Many people want to work with others to have a direct impact. People in are looking for opportunities to invest not just their money but their time, skills and experience. They’re looking for anchors – places to hook their attention, build relationships, learn more and do good.

Meanwhile, organizations are dealing with solving transactional problems like high membership growth costs and/or churn. Most members would be surprised to learn that the most important calculation of their relationship is acquisition cost and lifetime value. The constant need to replace members creates an endless search for new people, new lists, new audiences – attention taken away from deepening and sustaining membership.

People are looking for consistency and impact are hearing about crises and immediate needs. It gets attention. But we lose attention, tune out, and move on to another crisis.

Worse, people are losing faith in nonprofit organizations. It’s a problem for the causes and communities in which we work who are not consistently served by a committed group of supporters.

Thousands of nonprofit organizations have decades of data about membership programs. Yet, too often, membership teams are sidelined to focus on marginal list growth strategies. Conversations about innovation, sustainability, scale and value TO members get set aside.

We need to rethink what membership can be. We should share lessons, test outside the box, build partnerships across sectors (and inside organizations).

Creating Modern Membership Models

Now is the time to look at new membership models. Membership teams and their partners across the organization, nonprofit and NGO leaders, and even members themselves need new and empowering membership models that can engage and even excite people.

To get there, the sector needs testing and learning, networking and training, and many more opportunities to unleash creativity.

We believe that networks of people working in and around membership programs (everyone from membership teams to organizing, volunteering, fundraising and other roles) will create stronger organizations – and more powerful outcomes – with opportunities and resources to more rapidly learn, test and master membership programming across their organizations, campaigns and teams.

Why Now?

This is a time of declining trust in institutions. And it’s not just government. NGOs, nonprofits and even small organizations face questions from constituents and potential supporters about finances, diversity, leadership, sexual harassment and more. Media and news organizations rely on reader (and source) trust to stay in business.

Membership programs invite and build trust by increasing transparency and direct investment in an organization’s mission, values and operation.

More people than ever are engaging in advocacy and political campaigns as volunteers, activists and leaders. Nonprofit organizations can better learn from organizing campaigns – even those under their own roof – to build stronger membership programs.

Sustainable funding remains critical to the long-term health of nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits are raising money and figuring out monthly donor programs but aren’t innovating membership in ways that deepens affiliation to sustain themselves for long time and grow leaders.

Meanwhile, journalism organizations and others are looking towards advocacy and struggling to find/implement membership models and practices.

There is a place for renewed, revitalized and re-imagined membership in nonprofit advocacy and organizations. Some of this work is already happening in public service journalism through the efforts of The Membership Puzzle, the Coral Project, Open News and others. These projects demonstrate the value that testing and networking around membership and engagement bring to communities of practitioners.

We envision a project that advances membership innovation in nonprofits, collaborates with other sectors and ongoing projects to share learning, and makes it possible for far more people to become more sustainably engaged in social good and community change.

Goals of this project

Here’s what we believe this work can accomplish:

Revitalize the membership field so that a wider range of organizations and campaigns can reach more people, engage people more efficiently and sustainably, and promote growth of leadership, revenue and program innovation.

Build a learning community of people working in and around membership. This may include people in nonprofits, NGOs, advocacy groups, political campaigns and social movements, associations, trade groups and labor unions, journalism and community media and more.

Rapidly share data and resources needed to test membership and related programs in fundraising, organizing, mobilization, volunteering and leadership.

Identify and assess a variety of new and existing membership models that organizations, funders, consultants and members can apply, learn from, test and iterate upon.

Create a culture of measurement, testing, reporting, iteration and transparency that supports broader membership program innovation.

Process

What would doing this actually look like? Here’s an idea:

Create a network through baseline research and reporting.
  • Survey a broad cross-section of people involved in members
  • Get direct and subjective feedback on:
    • What is and isn’t working.
    • Identify good, great, creative work and thinking in membership.
  • Bring subset to a kick-off meeting/event/conference where diverse group meets, networks, shares learning, creates plans for next steps in community.
  • Identify what needs to be measured/evaluated for project impact and success.
Continue growing and sustaining a network of membership innovators and leaders.
  • Online/offline community (could range from just email list/facebook group to one or more in person events in different locations)
  • Identify need for and create training materials
Identify and showcase membership innovation and testing in the wild.
  • Membership Innovation Showcase and/or Membership impact guide. Read more.

Inspiration / Background / More Reading

Who’s thinking about this now? We’ll continue updating this list as we find/receive ideas.

Speed up membership innovation

Compact Flash photo via JD Hancock, Flickr. CC 2.0.

Thinking about Digital Strategy and Teams

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I’ve had several conversations the past few weeks about digital strategy and teams in nonprofits and media startups. They all come back to culture, teams, fundraising and the idea of digital-first organizations. Fascinating and fun topics but curious to be seeing this pop up now. Seems like the nonprofit community hasn’t talked much about digital teams recently – or not as much as five or ten years ago.

Then a great question popped up on the Progressive Exchange email list. Basically, how do we structure our digital team as we grow and evolve. People wrestling with this. It’s a huge issue impacting strategy, funding, leadership, vision and more. I threw together some ideas and resources on the question. How are you answering (or asking) the question these days?

QUESTION

We have a few staff who work on some aspect of digital but it’s not centralized so we lack in strategy and structure.

How do other nonprofits successfully structure digital teams. Are these teams stand-alone or are they housed under other departments? If housed in another department, which department makes the most sense?

IDEAS

Digital is in every role in the organization, not just a few people easily pulled into a single team. Everyone and every role can, will, needs to understand digital works.

What that means, for example, is that today digital tools/communications gives people a computer in the palm of their hand. It empowers them to be super organizers (P2P texting), fundraisers (P2P fundraising / online donations), lead their own campaigns (volunteers that lead parts of your network) and take on new roles (citizen journalism, citizen science, blogging, sharing on social media, etc.).

This changes everything about the role of the organization, its staff, and which assets of the group are valuable.

In practice, this looks different at different organizations.

Digital first leadership

What often matters most in a successful transformation is digital-first leadership. That could be an executive director who comes straight out of digital campaigning, organizing, or fundraising. Someone who gets networks, iteration, engagement, people power…can speak tech or at least not get lost in the jargon.

But in reality most execs are there to raise money, inspire, manage, set a big vision and give everyone else the tools to implement it. So a director doesn’t need to be steeped in digital so much as aware/supportive and know what to hire for while being able to let people do the work they were hired to do.

This is, in part, why you’ll see “digital director” roles. Where it works is where this role is someone with a meaningful guidance position. Access to and input on high level org, program, organizing, fundraising strategy. And some responsibility for managing digital leadership within teams. It’s going to depend on overall structure in an org. There is no one size fits all solution.

Do you need a digital department?

Where it seems most likely to get messy is when there is a digital department that sits next to a fundraising department, an organizing department, a tech department, an HR department, etc. (or teams). Then you get into questions/debates about what’s digital?

Fundraising and organizing are very digital. Tech is digital. Things quickly become turfy, siloed, easily contentious. Meanwhile you’re struggling to put the interests/needs of the audience/members/supporters first.

I have some other notes on the sort of membership and engagement strategy organizations could/should aim for if they really want to empower people to create change and sustain relationships with a “digital first” organization. But that’s for another day.

Depending on timeline and resources, it could be super helpful to talk to people building / running digital strategy and teams in digital first organizations – groups that started online or groups that have been making a transition to digital first.

Some ideas of who to talk to (not all inclusive – just some orgs I know well, know how they approach digital, know leadership, know they’ve been through digital transition, have seen in action recently, etc.):

SumOfUs
Greenpeace UK
Australian Youth Climate Coalition
Global Zero
Dogwood
Rainforest Action Network
Common Cause
The Washington Bus

RESOURCES

Nowhere near an all-inclusive list. Just what comes to mind first. All help thinking about digital teams though some are more focused on org strategy.

Digital Teams Report (2018)
NetChange Consulting

What makes nonprofit digital teams successful today? (article based on Digital Teams Report)
Jason Mogus & Austen Levihn-Coon, Stanford Social Innovation Review

Digital is a Strategy, Not Just Random Tactics (2018)
Ryann Miller, Charity Village

Understanding Digital Strategy (2018)
Harvard Business Review, 30 minute HBR podcast interview w/ Sunil Gupta, business professor and author of Driving Digital Strategy

Developing a Strategy for the Digital World (2018)
Harvard Business Review, Interview w/ Sunil Gupta

The Digital Plan (2018)
The Digital Plan book project is led by Brad Schenk who helped transform digital strategy/team at Rainforest Action Network.

Five models of digital teams (2017)
Jason Mogus, NetChange Consulting

Detangling Digital (2018)
Sam Dorman and Chris Zezza, Mobilisation Lab

Becoming a Digital First Organization (2016)
Alice Hendricks & Misty McLaughlin, NTEN

What Digital Really Means (2015)
Karel Dörner and David Edelman, McKinsey

Product teams: The next wave of digital for NGOs? (2015)
Sam Dorman, Mobilisation Lab

How to Build a High-Performing Digital Team (2013)
Perry Hewitt, Harvard Business Review

Five Dysfunctions of a Digital Team (2011…but still useful)
Jason Mogus, Michael Silberman & Christopher Roy, Stanford Social Innovation Review

Why not say “I don’t know”?

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Faking Cultural Literacy in last Sunday’s New York Times argues that social media (and online, omnipresent, instant information in general) has allowed everyone to have an opinion about everything. It’s worth a read but it misses the point.

A bunch of tabs
A bunch of open tabs. Illustration by Jennifer Daniel, New York Times.

American culture has long frowned on one saying “I don’t know.” To admit ignorance (regardless of source) is to admit weakness. It is to say to your conversation partner that they know more than you do (and must therefore be smarter, better educated, have better parents, read more, have a healthier diet, etc.).

Better to say something, anything, and fake it than perhaps question and learn from one another.

Case in point: I’ve been reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah. There is a passage in which the main character who has come to the US from her native Nigeria to study at a university ruminates on the classroom experience:

School in America was easy, assignments sent in by e-mail, classrooms air-conditioned, professors willing to give makeup tests. But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called “participation,” and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words. It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always say something in class, no matter what. And so she sat stiff-tongued, surrounded by students who were all folded easily on their seats, all flush with knowledge, not of the subject of the classes, but of how to be in the classes. They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.

We’re trained early on to have SOMETHING to say. ANYTHING. You don’t look smart (which is 90% of the battle) by quietly thinking things through. Nobody wants to hear of their child waxing philosophic. Leaders don’t hold firm to the gray area.

Social media and online information has not launched a wave of shallow knowledge—it’s always been there. Social media makes it more apparent, however. It also makes it easier to find support for our views without engaging in critical thinking or questioning our assumptions.

As advocates and social change campaigners we should be constantly aware of our role in finding, analyzing and sharing information. And recognize that most of us have an opinion whether we have knowledge or not.

We change policy by, in part, winning arguments but debate means listening and critiquing as much as it does espousing a viewpoint.

Engage, question, listen, think and respond. Don’t just make a point—create opportunity for conversation with your audience.

Listening to the Obama campaign’s digital team: Four ways to strengthen organizational culture

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Last week I was fortunate to be part of two discussions in one day about digital teams in big organizations. Instead of talking about the latest big win (and one had a huge win) or cutting edge campaign, both conversations veered towards organizational culture issues. One team addressed culture concerns head on, knowing it makes a difference in digital success. The other sees problems but is stuck, unable to steer, even a bit, the culture issues that weigh down the team.

One conversation was with a key member of the digital team at a national nonprofit advocacy group. The digital team has struggled for a while as the group has tried to figure out where digital fits in the organization. As we talked – and as I reflected on the next conversation – it became obvious that structure (and continual “restructuring”) wasn’t the whole story.

The second discussion happened at an event that included a panel of four key members of the Obama campaign’s digital team, including CTO Harper Reed.

Obama digital team leaders speak at Galvanize in Denver. March 7, 2013.
Obama digital team leaders speak at Galvanize in Denver. March 7, 2013.

I expected this panel to focus on how they pulled the products and technology together. The event was organized by a start-up incubator so it would probably touch on the lessons that iterative design, open source development, and relying on a cloud application servers might offer entrepreneurs.

[Read more…] about Listening to the Obama campaign’s digital team: Four ways to strengthen organizational culture

Your leadership elephant

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Elephant
Is missing technology leadership in your organization shouting at you? The elephant says it is.

Chances are your organization doesn’t have people in senior leadership roles with experience in digital campaigning, technology development, or online movement building. No high-level ability to analyze and manage the relationship between technology and programmatic outcomes may be one of the greatest obstacles to organizational growth and success today. And too few are talking about it. Get your board and managers together and chances that visionary and capable leaders comfortable with technology are the elephant in the room.

Yesterday, NARAL Pro-Choice America announced that Ilyse Hogue will become its next president. Ms. Hogue brings deep campaigning experience and, notably, a background in meshing online and field systems to build movements, raise money, and change politics. I don’t know exactly why NARAL made this choice but I suspect that online experience played a role.

Technology is Pervasive

If you work with technology at all you likely are (or have been) overwhelmed by the complexity and variety of ways to solve every problem. Web and social media metrics, application development, video production, and even web design are just a few of nonprofit tech subjects that are continually evolving yet increasingly basic to digital advocacy and marketing. [Read more…] about Your leadership elephant